“What should I do? I can’t stay here, I can’t run. Every move I can make brings more blood, more pain, more death. I’m so lost, mother.”
Marcus watched the slow smoothing of the creases on his mother’s face. Pockets of loose flesh formed at the corners of her mouth, her thin chest worked its creaky bellows beneath the cotton blanket. She was getting farther and farther away, coming back less and less often. Perhaps he’d left it too long.
He gave her hand a final squeeze and rose to leave, the rustle of his serape nearly obscuring the whisper that passed her lips.
“Ask La Santa, Marcito. She will know.”
Marcus rubbed his face. Always with La Santa. Don’t I know enough about death that I can do without counsel from her foolish saint? With an inward sigh, he knelt before the shrine, his eyes level with La Santa’s empty sockets. He drew a peso coin from his pocket and set it at the icon’s feet. His devotion made, he took a match from the pile, struck it alight with his thumbnail, and touched the flame to a candle. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to the shrine aloud, but he set the thought at the front of his mind: okay, saint. I’ve long been your servant, however little I believe. Show me the way forward.
He watched the flame perform its endless pirouette, searching for messages signaled in flickering orange semaphore or jotted in arabesques of smoke. The flame answered only with enigma, or more likely didn’t answer at all. Its reflection burned in his pupils, and he closed his eyes against it. He licked his thumb and forefinger and pinched out the candle. The flame died with an indignant hiss. He and La Santa, it seemed, had nothing to say to each other.
As he turned from the shrine, he saw a marcada standing over his mother’s bed. Slashes of blue marked her cheek and forehead. Her hair, its flaxen tint darkened by weeks without washing, clung in tight cornrows to her scalp. Marcus nearly didn’t recognize her and took half a step backward when he did.
“Selena,” he said.
Selena sat down on the chair next to the bed. “Is this your mom?”
“Si,” he replied, Mejise rising unbidden to his lips. It was remarkable how quickly his mind had reverted to its mother tongue. Hadn’t it felt like a foreign language to him just a few weeks before? He shifted his thoughts back to Llanures—a task that took a moment’s effort, as if forcing a wheel from one rut to a second one running in parallel.
“Is she okay?”
“She is as one can expect. She sleeps much, and is often in pain. But the Grey Sisters treat her kindly, and her thoughts are sometimes clear.”
“That’s good.” She watched his mother for a moment. Something large and hungry stirred beneath the still waters of her face.
“I’ve heard much of your exploits in the Iron Circle. It seems like many have taken notice.”
Selena’s eyes flicked to the shrine of La Santa. “Something like that.”
“Such attention comes with risks, of course. It is, how you say, a double-edged sword. I’ve overheard Thorin speaking unfavorably of you.”
“Well, I’m not much of a fan of his, either, if we’re being honest.”
“I am being serious, ‘Lena. Thorin’s interest is rarely of a healthy sort. You would be wise to fade from view for a time. To do otherwise puts you in danger.”
Selena chuckled at that. Marcus didn’t get the joke. For a girl so often dour, she showed flashes of humor at the strangest times.
“I’m sorry, ‘Lena. For all that has happened. My folly was not yours to bear, and you should have paid no price for it.”
“Don’t,” she spat, her voice spiky with sudden anger. “Don’t splash your guilt around like that. It’s not your fault Thorin’s an asshole, and it’s not your fault he managed to grab power.”
“Perhaps. But I could have told you not to come with me. I could have left you at the nearest pueblo until my business was done.”
“Yeah, and you could’ve bailed on your debt and used the money to fund our trip west. Or you could’ve never gone into debt in the first place. In every shit thing that happens, there’s always a way to blame yourself. Something you did, something you missed, something left unsaid. But you know who never blame themselves? Fucks like Thorin, or the Mayor, or the Archbishop of New Canaan. Those guys never misstep. Every choice they make is the right one, every problem is someone else’s fault.” Selena pointed to her brand. “You know who I blame for this? The guy who gave it to me. Everything else is happenstance.”
The room fell silent apart from the distant ablutions of the Grey Sisters and the rattle-wheeze of Marcus’s mother’s breath. Selena looked at the old woman with an expression close to longing. When she spoke again, her voice sounded at half its previous volume but somehow struck Marcus’s ears with greater clarity.
“I’m not here for an apology. I just want to tell you about something that’s happening in two weeks’ time. Maybe you can help me with it. Maybe it can help you.”
Marcus listened.
34: ¿Quien Lo Hizo?
Selena’s knuckles ached. She shook her hands until the sensation receded and resumed her flurry of punches. They struck a muffled tattoo against their burlap target, rendering an ever-deeper concavity into the slurry of dirt and leather that comprised its innards. Flecks of red dotted the grey-brown fabric, bloody stamps imprinted from the fissures in her chafed and stinging knuckles. She noted their concentration in a few key regions—belly-height, liver-height, face-height—and made these her targets. The dots grew thicker, nebulae condensing into crimson stars.
A crowd gathered at the mouth of the courtyard where Selena had set up her makeshift gym. She would’ve preferred somewhere private, but apart from the barracks she had no space to call her own, and she doubted the girls would appreciate the noise and mess imposed by her training.
Mary stood amongst the other onlookers and studied Selena’s progress, her expression teetering between impressed and appalled.
“Shouldn’t you save a little for the fight?”
“It’s days away yet,” said Selena. “I need to keep fresh.” She continued punching as she spoke and noted with satisfaction that her voice betrayed no signs of fatigue.
“You know best, I guess, though it seems to me that your hands shouldn’t be bleeding.”
“If your hands aren’t bleeding, you’re not working hard enough.”
“I can live with that,” Mary said, and withdrew into the crowd. She chatted with a few women—it was mostly women watching, Selena noticed, most of them middle-aged or older though some were as young as her—and reluctantly collected a few gifts, which she stored in a growing pile nearby. Neither Selena nor Mary was entirely comfortable with these offerings, but the women who gave them brooked no refusal, and in the end, it was easier to just take them. At least they were objects of little concrete value; Selena would’ve felt a lot worse if her patrons were bequeathing pesos or food, neither of which they could much afford to part with.
She hurled a final few punches and stepped back, noting with satisfaction the bruised concavities that formed around her targets. The bag vibrated for a few moments as it absorbed its final volley of abuse. A trio of guy wires held it tight to the ground while a hempen rope suspended from a rafter bore its weight. Selena continually expected some passer-by to pillage the setup for these materials—purchased with the dwindling remnants of her cancelled stipend—but so far no one had. She unwound the strips of cloth from her hands and rubbed the feeling back into her fingers.
The crowd dispersed, though not before half a dozen women approached Selena to proffer their own trinkets personally, which she would accept with a small nod of thanks. A few of them offered a small blessing or encouragement in Mejise. Selena grasped no more than the odd word and so could only smile stiffly and mumble gracias, but the speakers seemed aware of her limited comprehension and expected no greater reply. Perhaps that’s why they spoke in the first place; it was almost like a prayer to La Santa Meurte, hopes tossed into a
grinning visage where they would sink or float by a judgment beyond their knowing.
Gradually the alley cleared, leaving Mary and Selena alone.
“You’ve become quite the storied individual,” Mary said. “You should hear some of the things you’ve done. Rode with the harriers down to Zapata. Plundered Mad Hector’s hidden treasures and escaped from his oubliette. Crossed the Delta Sea on a raft you built from the bones of your enemies.”
“That last one’s only half true,” Selena corrected.
“The latest rumor is about your ear. Some of the women are saying it was bitten off by a scorned lover.”
Selena wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Couldn’t I have lost it in a battle or something? Maybe wrestled a mountain lion?”
“Don’t worry, they’re saying you got even with the guy in the end.”
“What, by biting off his ear?”
“No,” grinned Mary. “Not his ear.”
The two women retreated to a nearby tavern, where Mary ordered two ceramic cups of te de poleo, one of which she thrust on Selena despite her earnest but knowingly pointless refusal. They’d been through this ritual many times, and Selena had yet to successfully ward off Mary’s proffered drink. She told herself it was because to refuse outright would be unkind, though in all honesty she’d begun to crave the brisk tingle the liquid left on her throat.
“So,” Mary said. “You’re still planning to go through with this?”
Selena glanced around the room. Most of Juarez spoke little to no Llanures, but that didn’t make it prudent to blab about her plans in the middle of a tavern. She gave a curt nod. “Of course I am. I told you. It’s too late to change my mind anyway.”
The two women looked out the window at the horizontal strip of sky between the lintel and the roof of the building opposite. The moon hung just barely visible in the top-left corner, its gibbous belly waxing with each passing day.
“How soon ‘til it’s full, you think?” Selena asked.
Mary considered it, head tilted. She held her hand up and pinched its image between thumb and forefinger. “Three, four days. It’s easier to tell once it gets there.”
Selena nodded. Four days. It seemed an impossible stretch of time, the sort of centuries-long fabrications that she used to read about in her pre-War history classes and dissect with whispers at her parents’ table that night—the rise of Christian Rome under Julius Caesar to its collapse before the godless barbarians; the death of the flawed but orderly Drittesreich to the cancerous spread of Secular Globalism. An insurmountable span of days, and yet at the same moment not nearly long enough.
She thought about Simon and the girl who’d contacted her on his behalf—Emily, Selena was pretty sure. God, her whole plan rested on the girl’s tiny shoulders, and she wasn’t even certain she remembered the kid’s name! Still, there was nothing she could do but hold up her end, and hope that, when it came down to it, Simon could hold up his. It was beyond risky, but slim odds of success were better than certain failure, and the thought of her inaction resulting in New Canaan’s conquest of the Republic of California—knowing her parents’ crucifixion had been, atop its irrefutable cruelty, pointless—was worse than any punishment Thorin could dream up.
They finished their poleo in companionable silence and returned to the barracks, where Selena intended to spend the rest of the morning soaking her chapped knuckles in the washbasin. As they approached, she noticed her fellow marcadas gathered in a cluster by the front door, chattering in frantic Mejise. Selena couldn’t catch the meaning, but she recognized the tone: the giddy anxiety of a crowd witnessing a tragedy at arm’s length. She pushed through the crowd, murmuring disculpe, and made her way into the barracks.
A coppery stink hit her nose, followed by the cloying stench of meat going bad. A halo of flies circled her bed, their buzzing inordinately loud in the otherwise still room. She pulled back the covers.
Paulo’s severed head gazed up at her, his waxen flesh settled into an expression of peculiar calm. On his cheek, just below the red X that denoted his freedom, someone had carved a star.
The flies descended on the exposed stump of his neck. Selena waved them off and returned the blanket to its original position. She gathered the linens into a ball with the head at the center and carried them from the room. The girls stepped away from her, hands raised, as if she were brandishing a large and deadly weapon.
She and Mary took the head to the Iron Circle. A network of catacombs spread under the arena, their earthen walls carved into crude dormitories where the seasoned fighters stayed. Selena went inside and found some men she recognized.
“Lo siento,” she said, and handed the bundle to them. The man who took it from her had broad shoulders and skin the color of fallow soil. A red circle and X atop his former brand marked him as a Brother of the Iron Circle. He unwrapped the blanket, eyebrows jumping as its contents grew visible. He inhaled sharply through his teeth. The other men crowded in behind him.
“¿Quien lo hizo? ¿Qiuen?”
Selena turned to Mary. “What are they saying?”
“They want to know who did it.”
Selena turned back to the men, watched the molten anger flow across their faces and cool into unyielding stone. Saw the power, untapped, still coursing beneath the surface. She spoke her answer before she was even fully aware of it.
“Jefe Thorin.”
Part V: The Judgment of la Santa Meurte
35: Phantom Fireworks
The moon hung over Simon’s head. He studied its bulging roundness, hoping to convince himself that the haze was playing tricks on his eyes.
“Do you think it’s full?” he asked.
“It’s full,” said Emily, not looking up. She tended to the twin pots hanging over the cooking fire. Beans boiled slowly in the first, while a thick cornmeal paste sizzled in the second, its bottom crisping with oil. She took a taste with a wooden spoon, nodded, and continued stirring. Otis nodded his approval.
“Full,” he agreed. “Tomorrow’s the day.”
Simon looked up at the moon, hoping to spot something that might refute their assessment. But it was no use. It was a perfect sphere, a pale egg in which some cruel monster finalized its gestation. Come sunrise the shell would crack, and the creature would be free. Simon wasn’t sure what it looked like, but he knew it was vicious, and he knew it was hungry.
A hand rested on Simon’s shoulder, squeezed. Emily gave him a reassuring shake. “Hey. It’s gonna be fine. We got stuff on our side those goons’ve never even dreamed of.”
Simon closed his eyes and shook his head. “But what if they don’t work?”
“Of course they work. We got them out here, didn’t we?” She motioned to the notch in the western wall of the gully where they’d camped. Inside its shadowy recesses lay the dormant engines of Simon’s last hope. He’d fixated over their tiniest detail, studying every joint and seam and mechanism. But despite his preparation there was so much left untested, so many variables left unknown.
“There’s more to it than that,” he said hopelessly, aware that this statement couldn’t convey one one-millionth of his true concern. Its inadequacy was laughable; it was like calling the ocean wet.
“You’re right to feel nervous,” Otis said. “What we’re doing has its dangers, sure. But there’s danger in all things out here. You live in this wasteland, you face peril. It’s in the food you eat—when it’s even there for you to eat it—and the air you breathe. You’ve just gotta get used to it, else it’ll chew you up from the inside.”
“I don’t see how I could ever get used to it,” said Simon. “But I can live with it, I guess.”
“Well then, that’ll have to do. Come on, we should fill our bellies and get some sleep.”
Simon managed the former—the cornmeal was savory despite its simplicity, and went nicely with the beans—but the latter was beyond his grasp. His eyes remained open long after Emily and Otis had gone to asleep,
their slow breaths settling into a companionable rhythm, one rising as the other fell.
Doubts crowded his mind, shouldering past one another and shouting in fierce competition to be heard. What if the batteries lost their charge in the night? What if one of those old bits of machinery gives way? What if the electrical components—that you’d had no way to adequately test, by the way—fizzle out? What if you screw something up the way you always do? What if that screw-up gets someone killed? What if that someone is Otis? Or Emily? Or Selena?
What if she’s dead already? What if that guy who bought her went and sold her to someone even worse? What if you can’t find her? What if the people who took her find you too? What if they find the data stick? What if they’ve tortured Selena until she told them everything? What if they’ve contacted New Canaan?
The thoughts kept coming, pressing in tighter and tighter, the stink of their bodies filling his lungs, choking him.
Stop it, said a voice. Though it spoke calmly where the others shouted, it cut them off mid-word as if bellowing through a bullhorn. The silence that followed throbbed in Simon’s ears.
You know what you’re doing, Simon, the voice continued. You were the smartest kid at St. Barnabas. You could rewire anything the lectors threw at you. And you don’t slack off when there’s work to be done. If we fail, we fail, but it won’t be on you. This is our best shot, and we can’t take it if you’re too busy beating yourself up with self-pity. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow we carry off a coup.
Simon opened his eyes. Phantom fireworks burst across his field of vision. He rubbed his face until they faded, waited for the murmur of the old voices to return. They never did. Neither did the last one, though he could recall it much more clearly than the others. It had come as if spoken inches from his ear, yet its owner lay twenty miles to the south, handling her own doubts with the steely resolve that had always stirred in him love and terror in equal measure.
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